Angela Saini: Who Benefits From Convincing Us Oppression is Natural?

Supremacy culture wants to convince us all that it is inevitable. If oppression is natural, it’s hardly worth fighting, after all. Racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression have always weaponized science—and too many scientists have allowed themselves to be mouthpieces for oppressive ideologies. 

Angela Saini has written about the use and abuse of science to uphold oppression for years. Her books investigate the origins of misogyny, analyze how science is weaponized in service of oppression, and debunk common sexist and racist myths about human biology. 

In this episode, we talk about a range of topics, including: 

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About Angela Saini

Angela Saini is an award-winning journalist and Assistant Professor of Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She presents radio, podcasts, and television shows for the BBC among others, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in the Financial Times, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, and Wired.

Angela’s 2023 book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Nonfiction and a Waterstones politics book of the year. Her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was published to enormous critical acclaim, and became a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hughes Prize, and the Foyles Book of the Year. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong was published in 2017 and named the Physics World book of the Year. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages.

In 2020 Angela was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. In 2015 she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about birdsong and human language. She has also received a best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers. Angela started her career with the British broadcaster ITN on its news trainee scheme, before joining the BBC as a reporter, where her six-month investigation into bogus universities featured on the flagship national News at Ten and won a Prix Circom European television news award.

Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University, and a second Masters in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Between 2012 and 2013 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a 2022 Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and was in Berlin in summer 2022 as a resident scholar at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute. She has given distinguished and keynote lectures at universities across the world, including the 2022 Simonyi Lecture at Oxford, the Yale Poynter Fellowship lecture in 2022, and the Wollstonecraft Lecture at the London School of Economics in 2023. She was made an honorary fellow of her alma mater Keble College, Oxford in 2023.

You can find Angela’s books, all books recommended on the podcast, and numerous reading lists on the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page. 

Angela’s latest book will be out in January of 2027, and you can preorder it now.